Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Warner captures a reality in the way that women and men living the lives they do would process emotions and ideas, through objects and customary expressions, and even further how these people don’t really understand what it is that they’re reacting to or why they say the things they do, except for custom, convention, and the lack of alternative to say anything else that would be acceptable.

It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I’ll go to my grave now,” and had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her. Now regarded as something of an early feminist classic, it tells the story of Laura (Lolly) Willowes, an unmarried woman of semi-independent means who struggles to break free from her conservative family to carve out a life of her own in the lush and seductive countryside of Bucks. This was about the first 2/3 of the novel and finally, it shifts into something quite different and abnormal. Much like everything most associated with young women, it is popular target of public detraction, reasons spanning from poor writing style to the absurdity that a girl could ever accomplish anything worthwhile that was not inherently tied up with romance. Warner proves to be a most devious hostess, however: seemingly invited to a pleasantly amusing afternoon garden party, it is only as the sun begins to set that it slowly begins to dawn—this is actually a Witch’s Sabbath!Though sometimes disturbed by strange noises at night, she settles in and befriends her landlady and a poultry farmer. Part I sets up the situation against which Lolly rebels by narrating the events in her life that bring her to live with her eldest brother, Henry; his wife, Caroline; and their two daughters, Fancy and Marion, in London. Listening to these voices, another voice came to her ear—the far-off pulsation of a goods train laboring up a steep cutting.

We have a witches sabbath (this turns out to consist of folk dancing) and we have friendly chats with Satan, the Evil One, re-configured as the Cosy One.You see, Laura is a 28 year old unmarried woman who loved her father and knew nothing but a life in his house that enabled her to do as she pleased. Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night! She went up to the top of Cubbey Ridge, past the ruined windmill that clattered with its torn sails.

I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans….If you sell this Satan your soul he will attack your enemies with curdled milk and wasps, he will ensure they put on their jumpers the wrong way round and inside out and that they stub their toe on the way to bed and the wrong newspapers get delivered to their house occasionally. The story itself is frustrating, as all womans lives were in the 20s, and the result of that is a great theory where they give their souls to satan.